Pooled Storage Demo (5 Minutes)

Description

This demo is based on the Introduction to ZFS Pools tutorial by Stefan Schneider. We'll be using a USB hub and USB sticks to create a pool, copy data to the pool, and grow the pool. We'll also use the iobar utility to graphically show what's going on.

OpenSolaris Versions Supported

2008.05, 2008.11

Points to Hit

• ZFS uses pooled storage rather than a volume manager
• Creating ZFS storage pools is a snap
• Creating a pool also creates and mounts a file system.
• Growing ZFS storage pools is also a snap

Demo Prep

• You need 2 USB sticks and a laptop w/ 2 free USB ports. Plug in the USB sticks.
• Install iobar, which you can get from the Solaris Performance Tools CD
• Start iobar. From wherever you extracted the cd run ./tools/bin/iobar. The USB Sticks must be plugged in first in order for iobar to recognize them.

Gotchas

None yet known

Demo

Introduce iobar to the audience. Explain the each column represents a disk, with the far left column representing your hard drive. Each disk has a read and write column. In this demo we will create a pool. As we copy data from our hard disk to the new pool representing the USB sticks, will see the read column light up for the hard disk and the write column light up for the USB disks. The column on the far right is the total for all disks.

• pfexec su
• Run rmformat to check for existing removable media. Most likely only your CD/DVD drive will be listed.
• Plug in 2 USB sticks. You should notice some brief activity in iobar.
• Run rmformat again and make a note of the device names for the 2 new disks.
• Run zpool list to check your existing pools.

Create a Striped Pool

• Run zpool create stripedpool c0t0d0p0 c1t0d0p0 - Adjust your device names accordingly. Make sure iobar is visible so you can see the activity on the disk. Note to the audience that as part of the pool creating process, a zfs file system is being created an mounted.
• Run zpool list to view your new pool.
• Run zpool status stripedpool to view the status of the pool.
• Run zfs list to show the new stripedpool file system.
• cd /stripedpool
• With iobar visible, copy something from your hard drive to the stripedpool file system. I have a presentations directory which I like to use - cp -r ~/Documents/Presentations.. Watch iobar as data is read from the hard disk and written to the USB sticks.
• Run zpool list to see how much capacity is now in use.

Expand the Striped Pool.

You're pool is currently 2 GB, with still plenty of capacity available. But let's assume we were running out of disk space and we wanted to increase our capacity by 1GB.

• Insert another USB stick into the hub.
• Run rmformat and note its device name.
• Add the new device to the pool zpool add stripedpool c2t0d0p0.
• Run zpool status stripedpool to see the new device that's now part of the pool.
• Run zpool list to see the pool's new capacity.

Demo Cleanup

These are the necessary steps to take in order to successfully run the demo again on the same machine.

• If you are continuing on to the snapshot demo, do nothing. Otherwise, run zpool destroy stripedpool